(passages to come)

“We were a pastime for profoundly bored people addicted to dopamine hits from our machines”

“Doppelgängers are not the only way we can lose control over ourselves, of course. The carefully constructed self can be undone in any number of ways and in an instant - by a disabling accident, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep fake. This is the perennial appeal of doppelgängers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity - the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control.”